Did I just change one hamster wheel with another?
You know sometimes it feels that I changed one hamster wheel with another. The glamorous picture we often get from social media being a solo entrepreneur can be misleading. Of course you’ll get to see a lot of difference places, but starting up an online business no matter what country you work from is still underestimated hard work. I’ve had – until now – the most hard year ever trying to joggling with freelance work 80% of my time (so I could pay for a team of professionals), and my online business start up 20% of my time. I was so naive to think that if I hired a professional team to help me with the technical challenges in my start up that would solve any issues according to the 20% time I could manage to use on my online business while I was working on my freelance work. I did not have any clues at all, that when you hire professional people to help you it does NOT reduce the amount of work neither the amount of challenges. Quite the opposite although the team did it very well, I was certainly not prepared for the complexity of workload in the process. So complexity in workload, meeting deadlines etc in my collaboration with my team in starting up my online business AND workload in complex scientific projects and deadlines in my freelance work nearly run me over. I did not see that coming, and I’m thankful being on the other side of this huge workload. Thanks to my team and myself, I reached my goal for 2024 to get my online business started. Have I learned anything in this process? I believe I have learned very valuable knowledge especially how values in business can be interpreted different in a team.
I’ve found myself out of sync
What do I mean by that? You see one of the core values in my work-life thinking is, that it must be a business in sync with my heart and intuition. This year starting an online business have felt until now like “a survival journey” and totally triggered my overthinking mind. I started to notice that I was waking up in the morning with ambivalent emotions. I looked forward to work with the scientific projects and with the creativity in building an online business everyday, but I sensed that something was out of balance according to my own values and energy. So I got what you can call a wake up call, when I evaluated this “survival journey” after 8-10 months. I had compromised some of my core values. I did not like this push, push, push sales strategy that seems to have sneaked into my online business. I’ve found myself out of sync with my own online business. I have been so focused on doing the “thing” that my team said would be “the right thing to do”, and it might work for some, but not for me. I could not see myself in this pain-gain, push, push, push strategy, and it was certainly not my teams responsibility to make a decision to stop this – it was my responsibility. Although I could see it was an effective strategy on different levels, it was not my values. So I turned to my mentor in B- School Marie Forleo and her Team Forleo for support – turns out I’ve started out on the wrong foot so to speak. So I decided to let go of the team and only work with one VA (virtual assistent). Now since I did that the journey starting an online business does not feel like a survival journey, but a creative journey following my heart. My energy switched completely from being in a kind of peripheral participation survival mode to full creative participation. I’m creating my online business hoping to add value to my customers and clients. My vision is to call out peoples potentials, not by push, push, push strategy, but by planting a seed.
Planting a seed for individual and societal change
To me it makes a huge different in societal change, that every individual is believing in their own potentials and living an authentic life. My research (1998-2013)shows that a lot of people unfortunately don’t believe in their own potentials. My method in my research was doing life-history interviews with young people and adults. I also did observations on children, young people and adults at schools and in companies. I compared my research in Denmark with my research in Ireland, and the result was almost the same. The majority of the participants in my research in both contries did not believe that they have any special talents at all, and they did not recognise the signs of suppressed self. Long story short after 15 years of doing research in this field I concluded that one big cause in people not believing in themselves was the way western Education is organised. Every system creates an idea on “the right thing to do” and the results of that is a majority of people feeling the dissonance in that, believing something must be wrong with them. I’m here to tell them or you, that nothing is wrong with you. It has everything to do with a society conditioning people to perform “the right way”, and in that proces you suppress your True Self. Or as one of my participants in my research put it “going to school is like a detour to everything “.
Am I actually walk my talk?
So in my own startup process in online business I’ve found myself on a kind of detour myself. My idea was (and still is) to plant seeds, creating a healthy community meeting with kindred spirits on our individual soul journey, following our own paste, sharing our knowledge and experiences etc. Somehow it became a contradiction doing a sales strategy pushing people to perform in a certain way, doing “the right thing to do” (click CTA etc) and at the same time writing about following your own paste. Anyway – I evaluated my 8-10″survival journey” in starting an online business, and know it’s a part of my soul journey being aware of am I actually “walk my talk”? So instead of doing business as a hyper chasing game, that was NOT my intention, I understood that every step in my start up of my online business has to be in sync with my values, because doing business is creating relations for a bigger purpose is a journey in my heart, and a way to know the deep truth and responsibility of my purpose. At the same time getting my online business in sync with my values also showed me, that I make a contribution to society developing services and products to serve and create positive change in the future for all of us. My online business is a way that I build realtionships with you on our soul journey, hopefully creating a more healthy society with future generations believing in their unique talents and not suppressing their true selves. You might think why is she telling me about this start up proces? Just to let you know that it is on every level and in every detail you can have a feeling of being in sync or out of sync with what you do, and no-one is perfect- the wisdom is in the proces.
